Archive for April 2016

I am the bishop on duty in the House of Lords this week. This means leading prayers at the beginning of each day’s business – today at 2.30pm. The business always kicks off with Oral Questions, the four on the order paper having been selected in a ballot.

One of the questions on Monday was asked by Lord Stevenson of Balmacara:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the closures of regional museums, particularly in the North of England, and the impact of those closures on the United Kingdom’s creative industry and on the educational services provided to local schools and colleges.

Answering for the Government (DCMS), the Earl of Courtown got in a muddle and then missed the point. My question was:

My Lords, if the rhetoric about the northern powerhouse is to have any reality behind it, it has to include access to culture…

Share this:

Like this:

1973-78: A Common Market or a Project for Peace?

My childhood and youth were spent in ‘splendid isolation’ from the rest of Europe. My grandfather had almost made it to the Western Front in 1917, having lied about his age in order to join up. He made it as far as Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire for training, when his whole battalion was struck down by the flu epidemic. He only survived because his mother travelled up from Coventry and demanded her son back, producing his birth certificate. He returned home to a reserved occupation as a coal-miner. The only time I set foot outside the UK was on a 1966 trip to Dublin, where my father had qualified as a Baptist minister during the war. It was just after the IRA had blown up Nelson’s Column to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Uprising. My parents went to Switzerland…

Share this:

Like this:

1973-78: A Common Market or a Project for Peace?

My childhood and youth were spent in ‘splendid isolation’ from the rest of Europe. My grandfather had almost made it to the Western Front in 1917, having lied about his age in order to join up. He made it as far as Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire for training, when his whole battalion was struck down by the flu epidemic. He only survived because his mother travelled up from Coventry and demanded her son back, producing his birth certificate. He returned home to a reserved occupation as a coal-miner. The only time I set foot outside the UK was on a 1966 trip to Dublin, where my father had qualified as a Baptist minister during the war. It was just after the IRA had blown up Nelson’s Column to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Uprising. My parents went to Switzerland and Austria on ministers’ conventions in the early seventies, and came back with cuckoo clocks and stories of their attempts to cross the Alps in our ‘baby elephant’, the Morris Minor, our first car. Neither I, nor any of my three siblings had set foot on ‘the continent’ until my elder sister went to stay with her pen-friend in Brittany, aged sixteen. Apart from Mme Barsoux, our French ‘mistress’ (or so we wished!), my sister’s penfriend was the only ‘foreigner’ we had met when she stayed with us in Birmingham in 1973, the year Britain joined the ‘Common Market’. At the same time, we grew up going to school with Jewish, Cypriot, Punjabi, Pakistani, Afro-Caribbean, Poles, Irish and Welsh kids for best mates. These were not ‘foreign’ to us; we were all ‘Brummies’, though our parents sometimes felt and thought differently. Support for Enoch Powell and the National Front was growing in Smethwick, where my father’s chapel was, and Powell’s views on Europe also found fertile ground in the leafy suburb of Edgbaston where we lived. I remember a conversation at the manse in 1974, in which my Dad, named ‘Arthur James’ after the former Conservative PM and Foreign Secretary, A J Balfour, told his young Church secretary that he was voting Labour, as Powell had advocated, in order to get the referendum in which he would vote for withdrawal.

Unlike the more internationally minded and Labour-controlled city of Coventry, where my mother’s family lived, Birmingham and the Black Country remained a strongly ‘protectionist’ industrial conurbation, and sixth-form arguments at my grammar school reflected this. Most of my school mates were either sons of small businessmen and stockbrokers, or their fathers worked in the still-thriving motor works at Longbridge. They thought the EEC was destroying engineering jobs on the one hand, giving our contributions to lazy French farmers and preventing our imports of New Zealand lamb and butter. My father argued that it was an enterprise of greed, a ‘rich man’s club’, ripping off the rest of the world which the British Empire had done so much to civilise and improve through its imperial trade and missionaries. He was not alone; these were popular ideas in the early seventies, and not without supportive evidence. However, my generation could see that the world was moving on, and that our Britain would need to move with it or it would be left to rot in post-industrial, post-imperial ‘squalor’. We studied John Donne, D H Lawrence and Wilfred Owen for ‘A’ Level English, rather than Kipling, and realised that ‘no man is an island’ and that patriotism was not enough. In our hearts and minds the case for international peace and security were more convincing, especially with conflicts in the Middle East threatening to spark a third world war which threatened to end our lives before they had begun. The referendum debate may have begun as an argument about the price of eggs, but it ended as a question of survival and political progress. When the British people voted to remain, we felt like they had lifted the sword of Damocles from over our young heads.

However, there was still much to feel pessimistic about. The IRA had bombed Birmingham the year before, killing twenty-one teenagers and narrowly missing me in the Rotunda Burger Bar and on the number six bus on the way home. More than forty years later, we’re still campaigning for justice for the 21 and their families, and a European arrest warrant looks like the only remaining option. The Cold War was showing few signs of a permanent thaw. Europe was divided, both east and west, and border controls were being reinforced. I decided to study history rather than law, since looking back seemed the best way of ignoring the gathering gloom ahead. Nevertheless, I joined CND and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, marching to the US base at Lakenheath in Suffolk. I became the archetypal ‘angry young man’ in order to look forward. My first experience of working with pan-European campaigners was when attending the European Congress of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in London in April 1977. I had already been on a ground-breaking visit of Welsh and Scottish FoR members to Iona Abbey in the summer of 1976, when I committed myself to being a ‘minister of reconciliation’. My reconciliation work began that autumn with engaging in the conflict between Welsh-speakers and English-speakers in Bangor, challenging those who wanted to ring ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ (the Welsh-speaking Homeland) with a border to keep out English-speaking immigrants and restrictions on numbers of non-Welsh-speaking students. I also became fascinated by modern European history, from the radical sects of the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland to the syndicalists and Social Democrats of the early twentieth century. These activities and academic interests set me on a path of long-term association with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

1978-1988: Decentralism and Internationalism

Academic success and a determination not to return to the cold confines of Little England combined to send me to south Wales, where I could bury myself in the Big Country of the coal-mining valleys and the ambient internationalism of its coastal cities. I led a successful student campaign for a Welsh-medium teaching board within the federal University of Wales, but the determined drive for devolution ended in the debacle of the referendum vote of 1 March 1979, and then, after the May General Election, faced the full force of Thatcherism hit Wales during my year as sabbatical NUS President (that’s me in the middle above). The two events were inextricably linked. The devolution vote was closely associated with the unpopular Callaghan government and, in Wales, with a corrupt Labour establishment. I quietly continued my research on migration, together with involvement in various socialist education movements in Britain and Ireland. I trained for teaching in Carmarthen and helped organise one of the biggest CND rallies ever held in Wales, when thousands packed Trinity College to hear the historian E P Thompson address a rally in 1982. It was a high water mark in the unilateral campaign, however, and following the Falklands War, the Thatcher government was returned to Westminster and a blue wave transformed the political map of Wales.

I reconciled myself to quietist exile as a teacher in Lancashire, where I renewed my contact with the Society of Friends, before returning to my mother’s home in Coventry. Due to the blanket bombing of the city during the second world war, which my mother witnessed and survived, Coventry and its Cathedral have reached out to more than fifty war-torn cities and towns throughout Europe and the world. I had grown up very aware of this history and these connections and was determine, through my contacts with the Quakers, to contribute to the ongoing reconciliation work in educational contexts. Making contact with the One World Education Group at the teachers’ centre in the city, I began an advisory role with the West Midlands Quaker Peace Education Project, based at Woodbrooke College in Selly Oak, Birmingham. From 1987 to 1990 I was responsible for teams of teachers developing resource packs on diverse conflict and reconciliation themes and situations, for the fortieth anniversary of the Blitz on Coventry, supporting the attempts to bridge sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland’s schools, overcoming the racial prejudices and ethnic stereotypes of students in schools throughout the West Midlands, encouraging discussion on ‘apartheid’ in South Africa and Britain, and enabling constructive debate on unilateral and multilateral alternatives in disarmament talks and East-West relations in Europe and NATO countries. These activities took me to Belfast and Londonderry in one direction and, in the other to Bonn, then still the West German federal capital, for the world-wide Congress of International Teachers for Peace and to Brussels, for an EU Congress on Education for Peace in the schools of the member states, representing the UK and presenting the resources we had been working on in schools throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I was also invited to Berlin, but my determination to complete my doctoral thesis, together with a certain nervousness, justified by later revelations about the activities of the ‘Stasi’ led me to decline the offer. Instead, we forged links with Hungarian Teachers for Peace which led to the renewal of twinning links between Coventry and Kecskemét, facilitated by the respective councils and Coventry LEA’s Teachers’ Centre. During this time I also taught European Studies at a Technical and Vocational College in Dudley in the West Midlands, developing my knowledge of the work of the European institutions.

1988-89: First Adventures in Hungary

My first visit to Hungary was as a guest of the Hungarian Peace Council, a semi-autonomous educational and cultural organisation, in October 1988. The country, although leading the way among the ‘Soviet satellite’ countries in free-market reforms, was still firmly within the Warsaw Pact. On arriving at Ferihegy airport, a fellow colleague on the Quaker delegation who was well-traveled ‘behind the iron curtain’ and aware that this was my first visit to a central-eastern European country, asked if I was afraid of seeing armed guards at the airport. Having seen heavily armed British soldiers on the streets of Belfast and Derry, and at checkpoints throughout the province, I told him that it was not the display of potential violence which intimidated me, but the thought of unidentifiable guards at the hotels we would be staying at. They remained unidentifiable, however, either because they were very well camouflaged, or because they no longer existed in large numbers, and those that did were largely uninterested in a small group of western teachers, even though our leader was himself Hungarian, a refugee from the 1956 Soviet invasion of the country.

Tom was returning for the first time since he had escaped as a fourteen-year-old under the barbed wire that he himself was to cut and be given a piece of the next year. On our second day we visited Esztergom, the ‘seat’ of the Archbishops of Hungary, on the Danube bend. As we looked across the great river and its destroyed bridges at what has become Slovakia, our Peace Council guide told us that we were looking at the country which would be the last in the Eastern bloc to reform. We knew enough before coming about the Husak régime to agree with her. On returning to the minibus, we found our driver listening carefully, but excitedly, to the radio. The Hungarian Foreign Minister and Secretary of State had just made two announcements: that Soviet troops would begin withdrawing from the country the next year, and that the Uprising which had begun on that day, 23 October, in 1956, would no longer be referred to officially as a ‘Counter-Revolution’. We knew that we were there at the beginning of something, though the busts of Lenin remained on prominent display in the schools we visited, in Budapest, Szeged and Hodmezóvársáhely over the following week.

My second visit was as co-ordinator of the Coventry-Kecskemét Teachers’ Exchange in July 1989. This began a day after the leaders of the world’s seven richest non-Communist nations met at the Paris Summit on 14 July. Mrs Thatcher had annoyed French opinion by doubting the value of their Revolution, whose two hundredth anniversary it was. Generally, our group was on the side of French opinion and the socialist President Mitterrand, who is supposed to have described her as having the mouth of Brigitte Bardot and the eyes of Caligula. Nevertheless, she seemed unassailable as Britain’s prime minister. It was less than nine months later, however, that she felt the backwash of people power from the East, combined with her political vulnerability following the EU Maastricht Treaty crisis at Westminster. The Franco-German relationship and supremacy within the EU had not yet been threatened by the French fears of a reunited Germany. By contrast, the Soviet Union was almost on its knees. Gorbachev had already declared the Cold War over, meaning that the Soviet Union had been obliged to give up its attempt to compete with the US both militarily and economically. Shortly before our visit, in June, the body of Imre Nagy, the Prime Minister executed in 1958 for ‘leading’ the 1956 Uprising, had been given an honourable reburial in Budapest, with the leaders of the reforming Communists and the masses of freedom campaigners in attendance.

When the seven ‘western’ leaders met in July, 1989 was more than half over. No one around the table at the Arche suggested that 1989 might turn out to be a year of revolution on the scale of 1789, nor that there would be any revolutions in Europe in 1989. There was evolution in Poland and Hungary, and there was something starting to pass for evolution in Bulgaria, as well as the evolution in the Soviet Union itself. There, it was felt, the process ended, and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe seemed fixed in political permafrost. The conventional wisdom was that the current generation of leaders, including Honecker, Ceausescu and Husak, would have to die off before there could be meaningful change. At the Sommet de l’Arche, the world was still divided into three parts: the West, the Communist bloc and the uncommitted Third World. That division was over by the end of the year. Later, the falling of the dominoes came to seem inevitable, but at the time there was no such inevitability about it. Nevertheless, by the time President Bush visited Budapest at the end of July, Hungary had effectively ceased to be either a Communist country or a Soviet satellite. Senior politicians were, even then, talking of joining the European Community and NATO. Small things played a huge part, like the ‘picnic in the woods’ initiative in Hungary, near the Austrian border, in August, which enabled a number of East German ‘holiday-makers’ to escape to the West, and the ‘repairs’ to the barbed-wire fence along the border (below).

Our visit was one of these small things, perhaps. A group of English teachers from the pleasant, provincial Hungarian town of Kecskemét had been our guests in Coventry the previous Spring, enabling them to take part in the annual International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language Conference at the University of Warwick. Our purpose in visiting Kecskemét was largely of a civic and cultural nature, as the schools in Hungary had broken up for the summer a month earlier. We met the Mayor, and I have quoted from the record of this meeting in an article on 1989 elsewhere on this web-site, and from other reports made at the time. During the visit, I met and became engaged to my wife, Stefi, so for me the link between the two towns became a personal one. I paid my third visit a year after my first one, in October 1989. I entered one country and left another, without crossing another border. How was this possible? While I was in Hungary, visiting its beautiful southern cathedral city of Pécs with my fiancée in an Indian summer, on 23 October, it changed its constitution of fifty years, from ‘the Hungarian Peoples’ Republic’ to ‘the Republic of Hungary’ (see picture with text below) and announced that the first free elections since 1945 would take place the following Spring.

Before that, in January, Stefi and I had a celebration of our forthcoming marriage at the Friends Meeting House in Bourneville, Birmingham. Tom was present, together with British colleagues from our exchange visits, family, Friends and friends, and gave ministry in which he read from Quaker Advices Queries, advising us to continue to ‘live adventurously’.

By this time, almost all of the former dictatorships behind the ‘iron curtain’ had collapsed, though it was unclear, as yet, as to what they would be replaced by. Even today, it is unclear whether these central-eastern European states, with the exception of the old DDR, will become stable liberal democracies.

Hungary is no longer a Republic, since it changed its constitution five years ago and has recently erected a tall, barbed wire fence along large sections of its southern borders in order to keep out migrants and refugees. Poland, the Czech Republic (about to change its name) and Slovakia are also led by populist nationalists like Viktor Órban (below), refusing to relocate their share of refugees, and a British exit in the west might provide the catalyst for a break with the EU in the east, particularly if no common solution is found to the refugee/migrant crisis.

1990-1996: The Hungarian Democratic Transition

Spring came early to Hungary in 1990. I arrived on a crisp, bright Valentine’s Day ahead of our wedding at the splendid, art-nouveau town hall on St. Patrick’s Day, and began work as an Associate Tutor of Birmingham University’s Education Faculty, training Hungarian teachers of English at Kecskemét College of Education. Funded locally by the Ministry of Education, I was also responsible for establishing an exchange between student teachers, and writing an application to the European Commission for further funding from its TEMPUS programme, set up to support triangular exchanges of lecturers and students with the emerging democracies in central-eastern Europe. Submitted in French and English, the application also involved the College of Rennes in Brittany. I also found myself working alongside US colleagues who came to Hungary with the Peace Corps programme from February 1990. This meant that we were able to offer a wide range of courses in both varieties of English, but the main priority was to educate future teachers through English as a medium. In March, the Soviet Union and Hungary reached an agreement by which all Soviet troops would be withdrawn by July 1991. Until then it was not unusual to see Red Army generals in full uniform striding through the streets of Kecskemét, which had several barracks surrounding it, together with a military airfield. In the depths of the cold winter of 1990-91, I was the only person who stepped out into the snow to help an ordinary ‘Ruszki’ push his broken-down Lada along the main street into the town.

The Hungarian democratic transition gathered pace throughout the long spring of 1990. I was in the country for the first phase of election on 25 March, and remember the now famous poster “Goodbye, Comrade” (above), showing the back of a Russian general’s head, stuck to the lamppost below my in-laws’ apartment where we beginning our married lives before the money from the ministry came through for us to find our own little attic flat. At the College of Education, meanwhile, I gave a presentation on the British Higher Education system to the staff conference. The customary letter from the Education Ministry which had always begun these meetings, giving the term’s directives, had simply said “now you are free to do whatever you think best.” An elderly colleague observed that “it was the job of the ministry to tell us what it is best to think!” The “British” model that I laid out, in translation, was that of an Institute of Higher Education, comprising Technical, Vocational and Teacher-training colleges, which would eventually gain university status. This process is coming to a conclusion in July 2016, perhaps a mark of how much the democratic transition slowed in pace after the heady days of its first spring.

When the second phase of voting took place on 8 April, I was already back in ‘Blighty’, completing my work for the Quakers on the Conflict and Reconciliation pack for schools, which also involved a return trip to Belfast to finalize the materials with the teachers from the West Midlands and Northern Ireland. A visit to the recently bombed-out church of the Rev Gordon Gray was a humbling experience, demonstrating just how much work there was still to do. Yet there was hope of a political process getting underway and the EMU (Education for Mutual Understanding) Programme had run its course. It was the only Peace Education programme in the UK ever to receive official government support and funding. Our ‘mutual’ pack of materials was published by the Christian Education Movement the following year, and went into all its member schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Back in Hungary, reconciling and unifying figures were elected into office. In May, József Antall of the Hungarian Democratic Forum had become Prime Minister, and the National Assembly chose Árpád Göncz of the Alliance of Free Democrats as its President. He was an anglophile who had spent six years in prison for taking part in the 1956 Uprising, during which time he usefully translated Tolkien into Hungarian. Looking back, Árpi bácsi (uncle Arpi) as he was affectionately known was just the sort of wise old hobbit that Hungary needed, and he looked the part too! He died in 2015, and was deeply mourned, as was József Antall when he died from cancer after too short a time in office.

I continued to teach and to organise the exchange programme for the students from Kecskemét College who visited the Selly Oak Colleges with us in January 1991, and to edit the application for TEMPUS funding. While we sojourned in Birmingham, my first son was born in Kecskemét. The teacher-trainees from Westhill and Newman Colleges came to Kecskemét later that spring, attending placements in schools, social services, and doing research projects in Hungarian villages. The research has since been published in English, and is available on this web-site. One of the Hungarian participants, Hajnalka Szigeti (above left), later became a primary school teacher in Hastings, where she married a British man and has a dual nationality family. In the summer of 1991, I returned to the UK, with my new family, to live in Coventry and teach at Westhill and Newman Colleges. During that time, another group of students from Kecskemét visited Selly Oak, and we also played hosts at home to students of English from Italy, Switzerland, Lithuania and, of course, Hungary. We often took them on day trips to Stratford and Warwick Castle.

Looking to return to Hungary for family reasons, I was then offered a post by Devon County Council. Their councillors were united, across the political spectrum, in the belief that teachers in Devon schools often lacked the broader European awareness which was needed if its fisheries, industries and services were to continue to be competitive within the single market. As I had connections in both North and South Devon, I was asked if I would organise an in-service training programme which would support teachers in placements in Baranya County in southern Hungary, based in its county town of Pécs. Altogether, over the next four years, I recruited, placed, inducted, trained, inspected and advised a total of twenty-five west country teachers in a wide range of rural and semi-rural primary and secondary schools. Their initial employment in Hungary was often a complicated matter since they needed a contractual offer in order to gain a work permit, which was also dependent on their right to residence, which could only be decided upon through a series of medical tests, including one for HIV. Even children were subjected to these tests, a source of some controversy. It was just as well that they belonged to a programme which could organise these for them, especially as they had to be done in specialist clinics in Pécs, and not by local GPs in the villages where they were placed. With Hungary’s membership of the EU in 2004, most of these requirements on British and Irish nationals seem to have been dropped, but they might well be reintroduced for the former should the UK leave the EU.

Despite these initial obstacles, nearly all the Devon native-English-speaker teachers (NESTs) stayed with us for between one and three years, developing their skills in teaching EFL and broadening their cultural awareness, before returning to the west country to share the benefits of this in schools at home, though a small number have remained and settled in Hungary. They also worked closely with their Hungarian colleagues, many former teachers of Russian, covering for them in class while they attended re-training courses for teaching English at the university, and helping them to improve their own levels of English. During this time, both Stefi and I developed our professional roles as teachers of subject areas, especially history, through the medium of English. We ran a teacher-development programme in a dual-language school which examined the classroom discourse of these specialist teachers, both British and Hungarian, involved in the specialist programme. Both these were ground-breaking programmes, which continued to develop after we ourselves left in 1996, having completed the main tasks of substituting for the teachers in re-training.

1996-2004: Internationalism and Integration

We returned to the UK to work in a series of short-term posts in international schools in the west country. At this time, there was a huge influx of international students into these schools, which were struggling to cope with the impact of the lower levels of English of the incoming students, who were therefore unable to access the mainstream curriculum. We needed to provide intensive, fast-track courses in English for them, in order that they could integrate more quickly into the mainstream schools. As they were a long way from home, they also needed twenty-four hour care which we provided as houseparents. However, as Stefi was a Hungarian-qualified secondary teacher and a ‘non-native-speaker’ of English, she was continually discriminated against when she applied for teaching jobs. She therefore developed an alternative career in retail management, eventually becoming a store manager for Laura Ashley plc. It is now more difficult for schools in Britain to discriminate against ‘non-natives’, due largely to shared employment rights and standardised linguistic and professional qualifications across the EU. It wasn’t until 1998, when we moved to the Quaker School at Sidcot in Somerset that we eventually managed to combine all these roles effectively, so we delayed in having our second child, until another son eventually arrived in 2003. By this time, Stefi had been able to do some teaching, though mainly on an hourly paid one-to-one basis. Although we settled briefly into a family home in the nearby village of Winscombe, we soon found ourselves on our travels again in the late summer of 2004. This time, however, we were not returning to Hungary.

As the Cold War ended and the Hungarian people redefined their country’s place in the global community, joining NATO in 1999, it also began the process of reintegrating itself into a new, unified Europe. The road back to Europe culminated on 1 May, 2004, when Hungary joined the European Union as a full member along with Poland and the Czech Republic. As a family, we had decided not to put ourselves through the costly, bureaucratic process of acquiring each other’s nationality, since any rights which we did not already have through marriage were simply not worth it. Stefi had, since our marriage, had the right to live and work permanently in the UK, as I had in Hungary. Now we decided to live and work in a ‘neutral’ country where we would both have to learn a new language. We were offered roles as houseparents at an International School in the south of France, and moved all our possessions and our boys into a new adventure, and hopefully a new, ‘sunnier’ life together.

20o4-2011: Down but not out in Provence and East Kent

Our decision was almost as spontaneous as our decision to marry, but it didn’t bring the same lasting success. One of the reasons for this was that the French government had decided to apply derogation (to opt out) of the accession treaty requirements, so that it would not have to provide equal and unlimited access to its jobs market for potential Polish, Czech and Hungarian immigrants. Our employers told us that since they could not prove that Stefi’s role was unique and could not be done by a French national, they would have to discharge her. Since we had accepted our jobs as a couple, this made both jobs untenable. With the help of US and British colleagues, we fought this on the basis that Stefi was entitled through marriage to the same rights she had enjoyed in the UK. We won our case eventually, though we were nearly bankrupted and back in the UK by that time. One positive outcome was that our eldest son (aged 15) was fluent in French on our return, and was able to gain a place at a grammar school in Kent.

We found it wholly ironic that, having effectively been forced, however spuriously, to leave France due to its opting out from EU treaties, when we returned to the UK, we found that many Poles and Hungarians were arriving without any restrictions, to work in market-gardening, retail and hospitality. The UK government did not, by contrast, exercise its right of derogation, the very reason why it has faced such pressure over immigration during the past decade, a key issue in the referendum today. The negative impact of this core issue on the question of the UK’s membership of the EU, wherever we stand on that issue, was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. That decision was what led to the growth of UKIP, adding to the core of Euroscepticism within the Tory Party, to create the demand for a referendum, a demand which David Cameron felt he could not deny.

In 2005, it was Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to our rescue as a family. The system of tax credits that he introduced gave us the breathing space we needed to get back on our feet. In Canterbury, there was plenty of hourly paid teaching and training work for English language consultants, but few full-time permanent contracts on offer in the private sector. In the state system, there was plenty of supply teaching, but few permanent jobs for someone with my experience. After working with international business people and students on short courses, I eventually found a full-time role as a teacher of English and Humanities at IGCSE and International Baccalaureate Diploma levels, and of Cambridge IELTS. Eventually, both of us got full-time permanent posts, so that we were able to pay off our tax credits. Having returned to Hungary in 2011, it worries me now that, under the new rules being considered for migrants within the EU, we would no longer have the same immediate access to the in-work benefit system were we to return to full-time residence in the UK. If the UK were to leave the EU, our position would be even worse, since we would have to join a queue of migrants, including expats seeking to return. Re-entry might no longer be an automatic right. Equally, if we choose to stay in Hungary, as a non-EU national, I might be subject to a whole barrage of medical tests and bureaucratic procedures required of such nationals at present in Hungary. My status as the spouse of a Hungarian citizen might not give me the right to work in Hungary, so I would become dependent on my wife’s income in order to prove that I was not a burden on the Hungarian tax-payer.

2016: Home Thoughts from the Other Side of Europe

My eldest son gained a place at the University of Warwick in 2009 to study German and French with International Relations, and our moving back to Hungary in 2011 did not affect his status as a ‘home’ student. All his costs and fees remained the same, since we were only moving within the EU. Of course, now the UK has voted to leave the EU, this will change for families in our position, as non-UK residents will have to pay the same full-cost fees as other international students, and they will have no access to the student loan system available to resident students. This will affect our second son, should he wish to attend a British University. We would need to be resident in the UK to be able to afford for him to go. In his third year, our eldest was also able to take advantage of the Erasmus Programme to live in Germany and teach English in a German school. This benefited his German-language skills enormously, as well as preparing him to teach in a mixed-ability context in a gesamschule (comprehensive).

Of course, when the UK leaves the EU, there will be no funds forthcoming from EU coffers to continue these remarkable opportunities. We were also hoping that the creation of a new university in Kecskemét, built partly with EU funds, will attract many British-based students to come and study here for a semester or two on Erasmus scholarships. All these possibilities will be wiped out by ‘Brexit’. These programmes will no longer be there to add value to the education of students from the UK. Above all, I am proud that my son has followed me into the state system in England, especially since he is a teacher of Modern Foreign Languages, sharing skills which are vital to the future success of the UK economy and to trade within the EU and the world. Now that the EU is beginning to work in these ways for the benefit of all its citizens, we cannot understand why so many of the English and Welsh have voted to throw away these opportunities for their young people. They have decided to abandon these life-changing chances in exchange for a blinkered, narrow view of Britain’s future best interests. This is why I, for one, will continue to rage against the dying of the Light.

The current US President has been criticised for using the ‘British’ English word ‘queue’ on his visit to Britain instead of the ‘American’ English alternative ‘line’. I’ve checked my Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, which is very specific on these alternatives, and it confirms that the colloquial US use is indeed ‘line’. But why shouldn’t Barack Obama, with a multi-cultural Hawaiian/ Kenyan/ Indonesian/ mainland American background, show his flexibility in the use of international English, together with his awareness of audience? To assume that he is using a word because he is reading from a script written in Downing Street, as Nigel Farage and others have suggested, is both ignorant and insulting at the same time. What the ‘Brexiteers’ clearly didn’t like was the suggestion that the UK would have to join ‘a queue’ in order to get a trade agreement with the US outside the EU. However, the ‘Brexiteers’ recoiled in horror that an American President should use British English on a visit to the UK, in expressing his view on trade agreements between the US, the UK and the EU, now supported by the candidate most likely to follow him as the next President.

So I thought it might be useful to challenge the strange venture of Nigel Farage and others into the field of Sociolinguistics by quoting from a more expert, yet accessible, source. In 1992, J L Dillard, Professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, wrote his ‘History of American English’ for the Longman Linguistics Library. The book has since been re-published many times. In it, he deals with the suburbanization of the more affluent Americans in the mid-to-late twentieth century, leaving the inner city areas largely to minority users of highly nonstandard users of English. He argues that the suburbs is the locus of the most standard variety of American English. The well-educated products of the schools in these areas also show a greater tendency towards international interests, foreign travel and awareness of foreign languages and dialects of English. For such people of Barack Obama’s generation, he points out, British English may be less ‘foreign’ than the dialect spoken in the inner city:

“The very awareness of American/British differences may have worked towards a resolution of some of those differences, particularly in an international community. Almost everyone now knows about American ‘apartment’ and British ‘flat’… Americans are likely to collocate the latter with adjectives like ‘little’ and ‘cheap’. For Americans, anyway, the ‘sexy’ connotations of ‘The Apartment’ (the title of a film released in 1960) could not possibly apply to ‘The Flat’. In the case of words like ‘drugstore’ and ‘chemist’s’, it has long been the case that, as in a true language-contact situation, the American talking to the Englishman has wanted to use ‘chemist’s’ and the Englishman to use ‘drugstore’. Much the same can be said for ‘hood/bonnet’… ‘truck/lorry’ or ‘gasoline/petrol’… ‘on our own, where two persons can be alone, with no-one else around’ is familiar to American watchers of BBC programmes on public television, although intuitively most find the locution a bit strange and must remember to adjust for the British meaning. J K Galbraith had hardly coined the phrase ‘affluent society’ in his book in 1958 before British periodicals were using it. Most British would seem to have accepted the proposition that ‘American English is good English’ … there is really no more reason for Americans to defend their use of the language…

“Receptive control, at least, of many of the features of the English of both sides of the Atlantic has become fairly well established. If there is an accommodation because of the desire to reach an international market, still diagnostic features of each national variety are well established in the passive repertory of the other. In the case of ‘high tech’ there is virtually no difference; a ‘hard copy’ is familiar to computer-oriented Americans as much to British people of the same type…

“The spread of English, and recently perhaps especially American English, to become an international language – ‘the world’s second language’ in some presentations – can be accounted for rather easily in terms of military and socio-economic developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and not by any special linguistic qualities of English in general or American English in particular… Our language history unites us with Great Britain, it is true, and also with Europe; the contact varieties link us more than we had suspected with the so-called Third World. In the long run the linkage is simply with humanity throughout the entire world.”

The entire strategy of the leave campaigners has been to suggest that, outside the EU, the UK would be able to return to protecting its trade with its English-speaking ex-colonies in the Commonwealth and the US. In effect , they would like to revive a trading system based on a post-imperial view of Britain’s role in the world. Obama can see through this, and so should the British people. President De Gaulle rejected British membership because it would increase American influence in Europe, and French leaders remain sceptical of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ free trade model which seems to be winning the argument over the more protectionist Franco-German one within the EU.

So, what Barack Obama’s visit has shown us, both covertly and overtly, is that no-one in our twentieth-century world can expect to have a monopoly over either trade or language use. Those who, like Nigel Farage, indulge in phony linguistics, belong, with their politics of petty parochialism, to a world view of the 1950s. Whether they choose to ‘wait in line’ or ‘join the queue’, they deserve to be left out in the cold by more adaptable generations of humanity. Besides this, today’s English-Speaking world is very different from that of the 1960s, because the flexibility and diversity of the language as a ‘lingua franca’ has led to a situation in which the majority of its users are not isolated islanders, but interconnected users of it as a means of daily inter-cultural and international communication. In this world, the British (or rather the ‘Little Englanders’ among the Brexiteers) might have to accept that they cannot always be first in line!

Share this:

Like this:

In 1902, journalist John A. Hobson published Imperialism: A Study. The book was among the first to connect the rise of finance capital with the growth of imperial expansion after 1870. Hobson’s theory would fast number among the most influential critiques of imperialism. Although Hobson himself was not a Marxist (he was a classical liberal), his theory would play a key role in shaping subsequent Marxist theories of imperialism, most notably that of V. I. Lenin.

Share this:

Like this:

Following my recent visit to Iraq with Christian Aid, I asked five written questions in the House of Lords. The answers were published on 5 April and I reproduce them here:

The Lord Bishop of Leeds: To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of reports of the use of chemical weapons by Daesh in Iraq.

Baroness Anelay of St Johns: There are credible reports that Daesh has used chemical weapons in Iraq. The Government of Iraq, with support from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), investigated allegations of chemical weapons use in Iraq last year and has concluded that sulphur mustard was used against Peshmerga fighters on 11 August 2015.

Allegations that Daesh attacked the village of Taza on 8 March 2016, possibly with sulphur mustard, are being investigated by the Government of Iraq, along with two other recent allegations of Daesh use of…